Bridging Clouds and Humans with Unified IT Operations

By Adrian Bridgwater, August 16, 2012

Zenoss releases open source Zenoss Core 4

The growth of virtual and cloud-based IT infrastructures on top of our pre-existing physical data and application stacks requires management. We know this truism to be so. This management must exist not only in the sense of people, but also of course in terms of systems management software.

This layer may now increasingly be referred to as "unified IT operations" software; i.e., an entity capable of coalescing and tuning both the physical and virtual worlds.

Among the contenders in this space we find an open source offering from Zenoss with its Core 4 IT management solution. So what makes a good IT management solution? Well obviously lots of things, but "event processing" is a key attribute.

The ability to process up to 100 million events per day has been engineered into Core 4, and Zenoss says that its industry-standard AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol) middleware can be used to interact with all stages of the event pipeline.

According to its makers, "Core 4 now enables developers to automatically build, test, and distribute ZenPacks based on a user's platform and version. This platform aims to empower developers and users alike by allowing for enhanced collaboration, innovation, and quality of custom ZenPacks."

NOTE: ZenPacks provide a plug-in architecture that allows community members to extend Zenoss's functionality. The authors are free to choose how they license their individual ZenPacks. ZenPacks are encapsulated in Python eggs and provide instrumentation and reports for monitored infrastructure components.

"Core 4 is a major achievement for both the community and Zenoss as it introduces significant architectural and feature enhancements that cement its position as the most powerful open source monitoring solution available today," said Floyd Strimling, technical evangelist and VP of marketing & community at Zenoss.

"With the support of our more than 100,000 community members, Zenoss Core will continue to push the technology envelope, provide extensions via our ZenPack framework, and will further drive our leadership within open source IT management."

With the release of Core 4, Zenoss extends support for DevOps by releasing enhanced APIs and a new jobs system into the open source solution. Also, Zenoss has improved the usability and performance of the web-based user interface.

Zenoss went through a very intensive bug and testing phase to provide a solid product to the community members. The team also worked with community members to discuss key updates for the product.

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